About Us
SCES — the Safe Community Empowerment System — is a city-licensed operating system for public safety and human development.
We exist to govern the structural gap that has undermined public safety investment for decades: the absence of a unified system that connects agencies, sustains developmental progress, and holds outcomes accountable across every administration that follows.
Who are we
We are a team of governance architects, human development practitioners, policy designers, and operational leaders who built SCES from the inside out — from the courtrooms, the supervision offices, the reentry programs, and the community corridors where the structural failure of fragmentation plays out in real time, at real cost, to real people.
We have spent careers working inside the systems that SCES is designed to connect. We know where progress resets. We know which handoffs destroy what took months to build. We know the moment a participant moves from one institution to the next and encounters a system that has never heard of the one before it.
SCES was not designed in a conference room. It was designed at the intersection of lived governance experience, rigorous human development research, and an uncompromising conviction that cities can govern better — and that the people moving through these systems deserve nothing less.
Our Founders and Board Members
SCES is guided by an advisory board whose collective experience spans municipal governance, public safety leadership, human development research, fiscal policy, and community-based practice.
Board members bring direct experience from the institutions SCES is designed to serve — city offices, courts and corrections systems, policing agencies, academic research, and workforce development.
Their role is to ensure that SCES remains governed by the people who understand the conditions it operates inside, and accountable to the outcomes it was built to produce.
Viola Dunnom, Co-Founder, Audit Committee
Viola L. Dunnom serves as Co-Founder and Audit Committee Member of SCES, with responsibility for legal documentation integrity, records control, and administrative precision across the Corporation’s governance and financial systems.
She brings over three decades of experience within the New York State court system, including more than twenty years as a Senior Court Reporter, operating in high-stakes legal environments where accuracy, confidentiality, and discipline are absolute requirements.
Throughout her tenure with the New York Office of Court Administration, Ms. Dunnom was responsible for the real-time transcription and preservation of legal proceedings, ensuring that official records met exacting standards of accuracy, completeness, and legal admissibility.
Within SCES, Ms. Dunnom ensures that all documentation—legal, financial, and operational—is maintained with precision, consistency, and audit readiness. She supports the Corporation’s ability to operate within regulated environments by reinforcing record integrity, procedural accuracy, and compliance alignment across all functions.
Erika Young, Co-Founder, Audit Committee
Erika Young serves as Co-Founder, Vice President, and Audit Committee Member of SCES, with primary responsibility for financial governance, audit oversight, and institutional financial integrity.
She brings over three decades of experience in banking and capital markets, operating within regulated financial environments where accuracy, compliance, and control are non-negotiable. Her background includes leadership in complex financial operations, revenue systems, and high-stakes transaction environments, including IPO and SPAC administration within a leading U.S. transfer agency.
Within SCES, Ms. Young ensures that all financial systems operate with discipline, transparency, and audit readiness. Her role anchors the Corporation’s financial architecture—establishing controls, validating reporting accuracy, and ensuring alignment with institutional and public-sector accountability standards. Her experience across both corporate finance and community-facing governance positions her to bridge financial precision with real-world application, ensuring that SCES maintains structural integrity at scale.
Gordon Boyd, Board Chairman, Audit Committee
Gordon Boyd serves as Chair of the SCES Audit Committee and Advisory Board, with responsibility for fiscal analysis, audit authority, and board-level financial accountability. His role ensures that all financial activity, reporting structures, and system outputs meet enforceable standards of accuracy, compliance, and auditability.
Mr. Boyd’s background in municipal advisory and his experience within the New York State Assembly—where he contributed to infrastructure and fiscal policy—position him to evaluate SCES through a public-sector lens. He brings a disciplined approach to financial oversight, ensuring that SCES operates in alignment with government expectations, procurement standards, and long-term fiscal defensibility.
His leadership reinforces audit independence while ensuring that financial systems remain coherent, measurable, and institutionally credible.
Francis Zarro
Frank Zarro serves as an Advisory Board Member of SCES and President of Society Impact, where he leads the development of policy-driven, outcome-based solutions addressing criminal justice reform, workforce development, and reentry systems. His work focuses on designing structured interventions that reduce recidivism, improve reintegration outcomes, and align public policy with measurable social and economic impact.
Mr. Zarro is also the founder of In Our Name, a civic learning and advocacy initiative dedicated to exposing systemic deficiencies in the criminal justice system and mobilizing public awareness and accountability. Through this work, he has supported justice-impacted individuals and families, contributed to restorative justice initiatives, and helped develop programs that bridge education, advocacy, and direct system intervention.
Within SCES, Mr. Zarro contributes to the development of policy-aligned system architecture, ensuring that the platform integrates effectively with government structures, legislative priorities, and public-sector funding mechanisms. His expertise strengthens SCES’s ability to operate at the intersection of governance, public policy, and social impact financing.
Elliot Allen
Elliot Allen serves as an Advisory Board Member with specialization in emotional intelligence, mental conditioning, and human performance development. As the founder of the Mental Conditioning Movement® and the Mental Conditioning Gym™, he has developed structured methodologies for strengthening mindset, resilience, and behavioral control under real-world conditions.
His professional background spans engineering and over two decades in the NYPD as a Detective, providing him with direct exposure to high-pressure environments and behavioral dynamics.
Within SCES, he contributes to the development and delivery of training frameworks that enhance emotional regulation, decision-making, and personal accountability. His work supports the system’s human development doctrine by ensuring that internal transformation is measurable, repeatable, and aligned with performance outcomes.
Séan Martin Dalpiaz
Seán Martín Dalpiaz serves as an Advisory Board Member with expertise in real estate development, reentry systems, and housing-based stabilization infrastructure. His work centers on the design and execution of integrated housing models that support justice-involved populations and individuals transitioning from institutional systems.
As Program Director of the Osborne Association’s Fulton Community Reentry Center, he led the transformation of a former correctional facility into a 140-bed transitional housing model, integrating housing, workforce readiness, healthcare, and personal development into a single operational structure. His prior leadership in real estate and facility administration further strengthens his ability to align physical infrastructure with human development outcomes.
Within SCES, he contributes to the design of durable reentry pathways, ensuring that housing, stability, and development are structurally integrated rather than programmatically isolated.
Shanta Brown
Shanta Brown serves as an Advisory Board Member with responsibility for administrative structure, operational execution, and system-level coordination. She brings a disciplined approach to organizational management, with demonstrated capability in structuring workflows, managing multi-layered operations, and maintaining execution consistency across complex initiatives.
Her background in business development and strategic planning enables her to translate vision into operational systems, ensuring that SCES maintains clarity, efficiency, and accountability in implementation. She contributes to the alignment of internal processes, administrative structure, and performance standards—supporting the Corporation’s ability to operate as a coordinated system rather than a collection of activities.
Her additional strengths in communication and human engagement reinforce SCES’s capacity to maintain both operational precision and participant-centered effectiveness.
Anthony Gonzalez
Anthony M. Gonzalez serves as an Advisory Board Member with expertise in clinical intervention, behavioral health systems, and senior-level training. His career spans over three decades in correctional systems, addiction treatment, and human services, with a focus on substance abuse treatment, criminal thinking education, and structured behavioral change.
As a former Master-Level CASAC counselor and lead trainer within the New York State correctional system, he played a central role in developing and implementing relapse prevention and treatment frameworks for justice-involved populations. His experience as a therapist, educator, and program developer positions him to guide SCES in integrating clinical rigor into its human development model.
Within SCES, he supports the design of evidence-based intervention pathways and training systems that ensure behavioral transformation is both clinically informed and operationally executable.
Our Bold Promises
Commitment to Excellence
To the Cities We Serve: We will never deliver a program when what your city needs is infrastructure.
To the People Moving through the System: We will never build a system that treats you as a problem to be managed.
To the Agencies and Partners Who Operate Alongside Us: We will never ask you to surrender your authority to gain coherence.
We Build Human Assets
These are not values we aspire to. They are the operating conditions under which SCES was built and the standard by which every decision inside it is measured.
Trust
We believe trust is the foundational infrastructure of every system we build. Cities trust SCES with their authority. Participants trust SCES with their progress. Agencies trust SCES with their data.
We treat that trust as the most consequential resource we manage — because a system that loses the trust of any of its principals cannot govern anything. We earn it through transparency, protect it through consistency, and rebuild it through accountability when we fall short.
Honesty
We believe honesty is a governance requirement, not a cultural preference. SCES is designed to surface what is not working as clearly as it surfaces what is. We will tell a city when its corridor is underperforming before the city tells us.
We will tell a participant when their progression is stalling before the gate does. We will tell a partner when alignment has drifted before outcomes degrade. Honesty delivered early protects everyone. Honesty withheld protects no one.
Integrity
We believe integrity is what holds the system together when political pressure, budget cycles, and leadership transitions attempt to pull it apart. The licensing architecture of SCES is built on this value — fidelity to design is not enforced only when someone is auditing.
It is the condition under which we operate every day, in every corridor, at every scale. We do not lower the standard when lowering it would be easier. We build systems that make the standard self-enforcing.
Principles
We believe personal leadership is an individual choice before it becomes a formal title — and that principle-centered leadership at every level of an organization is what determines whether that organization produces durable results or impressive activity.
Every member of the SCES team, every partner who operates inside the corridor, and every agency that connects to the system operates under the same expectation: lead from principle first. The system is only as principled as the people who govern it.
Does your city have a fragmentation problem?
A 6-question assessment that identifies your city's fragmentation profile. Takes 2 minutes. No contact information required.
Your responses are not scored or shared. This assessment is designed to help you identify your city's specific fragmentation pattern — nothing else.
Six questions about your city. No right or wrong answers. No scoring. This assessment is designed to identify which fragmentation patterns are present in your city's public safety and human services systems — so you know exactly what your City Fragmentation Evaluation will address.
When an individual moves from your city's justice supervision to a community service provider, what typically happens to the progress they made in supervision?
How would you describe the relationship between your city's public safety agencies and your community-based service providers?
When your city evaluates the outcomes of its public safety and human services investments, what does that evaluation primarily measure?
In your city, what typically determines when an individual advances from one level of supervision or support to the next?
How does your city currently measure whether a public safety or human development investment is reducing long-term system costs?
When a new administration takes office in your city, what typically happens to the public safety and human development initiatives the prior administration built?
Your city's fragmentation profile is ready.
Based on your responses, your city shows — of 6 fragmentation indicators that SCES is specifically designed to govern. Your full City Fragmentation Evaluation details what each indicator means for your public safety outcomes, your fiscal exposure, and your governance architecture.
Your City Fragmentation Evaluation
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